Does God Exist Archives - Page 197 of 203

April 1, 2017October 6, 2018

Soil Studies Speak of God’s Preparation for Humans

Healthy Soil
There is an economy of language in the Hebrew descriptions of the Bible. In Genesis 2:8-9 for example, the Bible says: “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees to grow out of the ground…”

We can learn a lot from those verses. They tell us that the Lord planted something, he did not “zap” something into existence. Later the man was told to tend the garden (verse 15), suggesting that it needed care to continue to provide for the man’s needs and later for the woman’s needs. How long was it after God planted the trees before they began to produce fruit? What did Adam and Eve have to do to take care of the garden? How long was it before Adam and Eve sinned? What else did God need to do in the process of planting the trees?

This last question opens the door to a great deal of understanding that science has gained in recent years through the study of soil chemistry. Plants do not grow in sterile sand. For soil to nourish plants so that they can feed us, much careful science has to be applied. Modern soil scientists refer to “healthy soil” meaning that it is rich in organic material, is crumbly, and has the right chemical profile. To have these things, the soil must contain microbes including bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa. A teaspoon of healthy soil can hold more microorganisms than there are people on Earth.

We now know that there is a symbiotic relationship between plants and soil microbes. Plants use the sun’s energy to pull carbon dioxide from the air and create a carbon-rich nutrient packet to allow growth. Oxygen is released in that process. The plants also leak nutrients to the microbes, and the microbes supply plants with other nutrients they have extracted from the minerals in the soil. The fungi produce an underground network that brings water and carbon to the plants. When insects begin to feed on a plant, fungi filaments called hyphae help the plant bring tiny soil nematodes that feed on the insects.

When humans abuse the soil and interrupt this system, we have to artificially add chemicals to do what organisms in the soil were designed to do. The chemicals of modern farming could be reduced or eliminated if farmers worked on building healthy soils. The Garden of Eden was a place of healthy soil. God used incredible wisdom and intelligent design to build a system that would meet human needs. This was done in God’s time and was not a magic show, but a consciously built system that has sustained all living things for a very long time. Proverbs 8:22-31 tells us that wisdom was involved in all of this planning and design, and Romans 1:18-22 lets us know that all of this is a testimony to the existence of God.

There is a wonderful article in the April/May 2017 issue of National Wildlife page 35 (available online http://www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/National-Wildlife/Gardening/Archives/2017/Soil.aspx) that documents all of this and shows us the complexity of God’s soil science.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 31, 2017October 6, 2018

“I Told You So.” Here Comes Sologamy

One of the problems involved in the gay marriage movement is that once the definition of marriage is changed, anything is possible. One of the newest examples of this is self-marriage. Anderson Cooper on CNN interviewed a North Dakota woman who married herself in front of forty friends. Cosmopolitan magazine published an article titled “Why I Married Myself.” It said, “Self-marriage is a small but growing movement, with consultants and self-wedding planners popping up across the world.” Some self-marriages have been lavish, expensive affairs with many bridesmaids. (It’s usually women who self-marry.) To go the cheap way, there is a website where you can get a self-marriage kit for $50.

What is incredible about all this is not the fact that creative people will develop items to fit a growing social trend, but that people actually think that all marriage consists of is a ceremony and a piece of paper. God’s plan in Genesis 2:20-24 was initiated at least in part because “it is not good for man to be alone.” When people try to substitute same-sex marriage, polygamy, marrying their pets, or themselves for God’s planned relationship the result is always disaster and frustration.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 30, 2017October 6, 2018

ID Extremism

Scientific Research

Twelve years ago every major news magazine had multiple articles on the Intelligent Design Movement, and it was getting many comments in scientific journals of every discipline and at every level. Unfortunately, most of the publicity was negative. This is not too surprising to see in the media, but it is disturbing when it starts showing up in reputable scientific journals that have traditionally not been antagonistic to belief in God. In this case, the villains causing the antagonism were not all atheists. Apologetic journals like Science and Theology News, The Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, and Science and Spirit joined the chorus of voices opposing the teaching of ID in school science classes.

Before going any further in this discussion, we would like to emphasize that the material presented by people like Michael Behe is a wonderful apologetic. I mean that the work by the primary Intelligent Design scientists is wonderful material to convince the skeptic that there is design in the world around us and that chance is an invalid mechanism to explain the creation of the world. In our materials, we use design as a means of discussing whether the cause of the creation is blind, mechanistic chance or whether a personal intelligence created the cosmos for a purpose. What should not be done is to use the Intelligent Design as a means of doing science, or determining what science should and should not investigate. The idea of using ID as a means of doing science is an extreme view, and that is what many critics of the ID movement have pointed out.

Our understanding of how natural processes work has enabled us to know that viruses can mutate and become a major threat to human life. We know this because science has learned that there are mechanisms in the genetic makeup of living things that allow mutations to happen. This is a kind of factual evolution, and it is at the basis of much of what is done in the world of medicine today. That does not contradict the Bible, or that deny that intelligence was involved in the design of life. This adaptability built into the design of life is what allows us to develop agriculture in a way that augments the food supply. It has allowed life to exist in a variety of habitats, and it is vital to our understanding of how we should manage resources.

The problem with some ID promoters is that they would attempt to deny all of this. If you say that God created the virus as is and that no change can take place, you are simply in error. If you say that this kind of change might occur, but that more complicated changes cannot and therefore should not be investigated, you have stopped research and stifled investigations that might be very important. Human misunderstanding cannot be allowed to stop the research to find what is true. Part of the problem here is not understanding what evolution is and confusing the fact of evolution with various theories of evolution. Medical science recognizes the kind of change that we are concerned about with influenza viruses. In the Bible we see Jacob doing things with Laban’s flocks that incorporate the same ideas.

Intelligent Design is not a method of doing science. We will not use it to build a new drug to fight cancer or to make a new rocket. As new drugs are developed, and new journeys to other worlds are taken, what we discover will agree with and support faith in God and in the Bible. Let us use the discoveries of science to help us see God’s wisdom and design in the world. Let’s not assume that somehow our inability to understand what God has done will lead us to develop a medical cure or a new and beneficial device.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 29, 2017October 6, 2018

License Plate Storm Brewing

Here in Indiana, there has been a battle going for many years about what you can put on a license plate. Personalized plates are legal here, but they must meet three criteria:

*They cannot carry a connotation offensive to good taste or decency.
*They cannot be misleading.
*The BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles) cannot consider it improper.

In 2013 when the BMV refused to allow a motorist to have a plate that just had “OINK” written on it, the ACLU sued. Almost any religious message has been considered offensive and improper, so “Jesus Saves” has been rejected and having the name of a church has been rejected. These cases have been local because no one wanted to go to court until this February when Chris Bontrager of Goshen was told he couldn’t put “ATHEIST” on a plate. The ACLU got involved again, and on March 20 Bontrager got his plate.

The question now becomes why an atheist should be allowed to put his belief system on the plate when no one else has been given the same privilege. The answer may simply be that no one asked, but you can be sure there will be people jumping on the wagon at this point, and all kinds of messages will be suggested.

Part of the problem here is the question of religious pluralism. If “CHRISTIAN” can’t be put on the plate because it is offensive to Hindus, Muslims, or Atheists, why can’t the same logic apply to “ATHEIST.” Stay tuned.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 28, 2017October 6, 2018

The “Aliens” Among Us

Imagine a creature that has no backbone, no ribs, in fact, no skeletal structure at all. It can weigh up to 200 pounds (90 kg), and its arms can be almost seven feet (2 m) long. It has three hearts, and the color of its blood is blue. Its limbs are covered with hundreds of tongues which have taste receptors, and its body is embedded with cells that sense light. Its eight arms are covered with suckers that can be moved independently and have tongues and taste receptors embedded in them. This “alien” creature is not as alien as you might think. It’s the octopus.

The octopus is the dominant member of a class of marine animals called cephalopods which number some 750 known living species. Octopuses have about 300 species, and they are far and away the most intelligent of the cephalopods. Trying to keep an octopus in an aquarium is almost impossible because they always find ways to escape. Since they have no skeletal structure, they can squeeze through the smallest crack. They can unscrew a jar lid, fit into a drain pipe, and camouflage their activity by releasing a cloud of ink. In an article on “Animal Intelligence” in the “News and Notes” section of our November/December 2016 printed publication, we told the story of “Inky” the octopus. Inky squeezed through a narrow gap at the top of his tank at the National Aquarium of New Zealand. After flopping to the floor, Inky scooted across the room to the opening of a drain pipe. He got into the pipe and dropped 164 feet (50 m) to where the pipe entered the sea, and there he escaped.

Octopuses are designed to control various animal populations in the coral reefs and other areas of the oceans. They are beautiful creatures that are part of God’s design for an ocean environment that humans are only beginning to understand.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 27, 2017April 16, 2019

Missing the Beginning

The first word in the Hebrew text of Genesis is reshith, translated into English as “In the beginning.” For hundreds of years, atheists have tried to dispute the notion that there was a beginning. Until the latter part of the twentieth-century scientists didn’t know that there was a beginning. There is an old joke that says, “What did Moses know that Einstein didn’t?” The answer: “That there was a beginning.” Why was science missing the beginning?

The problem is that if a person admits that there was a beginning, they are faced with the question, “What was the cause of the beginning?” It is much simpler just to deny that there was a beginning and maintain that everything has always been–not necessarily as it is today, but in a form that could change into what we see today.

In the 2003 version of the Humanist Manifesto, the statement was clearly made, “The universe is self-existing and not created.” Older versions had the word “eternal” in the statement. It is obvious that the question of origins is evaded by the use of “self-existing” so the word “eternal” is not needed. Atheists will usually respond to this point by saying that religious people claim God is self-existing, so there is no reason why atheists cannot make the same claim about the universe. Carl Sagan in his book Cosmos said, “Why is it any more reasonable to say that God has always been than to say that the cosmos has always been?”

The answer to this challenge lies in the nature of God and the nature of the cosmos. When we measure light, we measure its frequency in cycles per second. When we measure speed in space, we measure it in meters per second. Force, mass, acceleration, energy, momentum, and inertia are all measured in space/time units. We are limited to understanding things in terms of time and space. Various scientific measuring tools have verified that there was a beginning to time and space. The cosmos is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, suggesting that it has accelerated away from a place where it began.

Since research in all areas of science has made it increasingly obvious that the cosmos had a beginning, science seeks to explain the beginning. The result is that theories are being proposed such as String Theory which suggests that there are multiple dimensions beyond our own. Since String Theory and proposals of multiple universes cannot be tested scientifically, they fail to give an answer to the beginning. We are limited by our inability to devise experiments to measure and test these theories. The biblical term “In the beginning” refers to the origin of all of reality. Whether God created the universe using strings of energy or a big bang is not relevant.

The atheist will say that being unable to explain origins does not necessarily mean that God did it. We are not proposing a “God-of-the-Gaps” argument in which we say, “God did it because we have no other explanation.” What we are saying is that the Bible makes it clear that God is outside of all other dimensions. God is described as the creator of time and space. God is described as a being with no time/space dimensional limitations (1 John 1:5; 4:8,12,16; 2 Peter 3:8; Colossians 1:16-17). Also, the biblical description of God shows a number of properties that are clearly seen in the cosmos and which blind chance would not produce. These include love, care, design, patience, personality, purpose, wisdom, and planning.

Now that science is not missing the beginning, more and more evidence is coming to light showing that our universe was designed and fine-tuned to sustain carbon-based life. Atheists and skeptics may try to counter this evidence, but they have no real alternative to offer.

March 26, 2017April 10, 2019

The Laws of Physics

“Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. Even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us.”
–Paul Davies, Templeton Prize Address, May 1995.

Where did the laws of physics come from? Are they our laws or nature’s laws? Did Newton’s inverse law of gravitation come into existence because of the culture in which Newton lived? According to Davies, to suggest that is “arrant nonsense.” The laws are extracted through experiment and mathematical theory. The laws are not something that our culture presses upon us. They are God’s message to us.

In his presentation, Davies asked why we have these laws instead of some other set of laws. He raised the question of why this set of laws works for us. The laws seem to be contrived, fine-tuned, and formulated so that life and consciousness can exist. Some scientists suggest that there are multiple universes where different laws are present and different sentient beings survive due to those laws. They are making a creative response to this question; but not only is the suggestion un-testable, it also conflicts with the obvious complexity of the laws that work in our universe. Here in the twenty-first century, we are still finding new laws and new understandings that clarify what has been given to us by past scientists.

Dr. John Barrow in his Templeton address observed, “In the history of science new theories extend and subsume old ones. Although Newton’s theory of mechanics and gravity has been superseded by Einstein’s and will be succeeded by some other theory in the future, a thousand years from now engineers will still rely on Newton’s theories. Likewise religious conceptions of the universe also use approximations and analogies to help in grasping ultimate things.”

We suggest that the Psalmist’s statement, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork” (Psalms 19:1), will still be quoted and be relevant should Earth survive for a thousand years.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 25, 2017October 6, 2018

Antony Flew and the Failures of Modern Atheism

Antony Flew was one of the most famous atheists of the twentieth century. He wrote over thirty books opposing religion and was a professor at the University of Keele and at Oxford, Aberdeen, and Reading. Flew changed his mind about the existence of God because he said, “You have to go where the evidence leads you.” In his final book There is a God he describes the failures of modern atheism:

1) Atheists refuse to engage the real issues involved in the question of God’s existence.
2) Atheists do not address the central grounds for positing a divine reality.
3) Atheists fail to address the issue of the origins of rationality embedded in the fabric of the universe, of life understood as autonomous agency, and of consciousness, conceptual thought, and the self.
4) Atheists show no awareness of the fallacies and muddles that led to the rise and fall of logical positivism. The “new atheism” is nothing less than a regression to the logical positivist philosophy.
5) The excesses and atrocities of organized religion have no bearing whatsoever on the existence of God.

You find more details on each of these points in Flew’s book. Atheists try to suggest that only the ignorant and uneducated believe in God, but the evidence is to the contrary. Flew is just one example of people with extraordinary intelligence who see the evidence and base what they believe on that evidence.
–John N. Clayton © 2017

March 24, 2017November 7, 2018

Bee Facts

In addition to yesterday’s article on the use of quantum mechanics by bees, here are some more incredible bee facts about these amazing creatures:

– Bees have five eyes–two large compound eyes and three simple eyes (ocelli) used to detect light intensity. A worker bee’s eyes have 7,000 lenses.

– Bee wings have an electrostatic charge which attracts pollen.

-A bee has two sets of wings. Rapid slapping generates warmth and evaporates water from nectar to make honey.

– Bees have wing hooks which enable the bee to use one of each set of wings or use the wings together for maximum efficiency.

– The proboscis, which is an airtight straw-like tube, sucks up nectar and also works in reverse to feed offspring from a honey stomach.

-The bee has a mandible with jaws that help bite and pack pollen as well as shape wax for building the honeycomb.

– Leg brushes scrape pollen from front to back where it collects in the pollen sac attached to the rear leg.

– Bees have a honey stomach which is a second reservoir where they temporarily store nectar before it is regurgitated.

– A worker bee can carry more than half its weight in pollen and can visit up to 100 flowers in one trip.

– A queen bee lays 1500 eggs a day and lives for three to seven years.

March 23, 2017October 6, 2018

Bees and Quantum Mechanics

One of the most detailed discussions of living things is Karl von Frisch’s book Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Von Frisch spent 40 years studying how bees communicate to other bees information about pollen sources. He referred to the honeycomb as a dance floor and described the bee making a “waggle dance” which gave other bees information where to find nectar. The bee dance indicates the direction to this food source and an alteration of the shape of the dance indicates the distance to the source. If the food source was close, the bee uses a round dance instead of the waggle dance. Von Frisch’s study catalogs what the bee does, but it doesn’t tell you how the bee does it.

Barbara Shipman is a mathematician with an interest in bees. There is a mathematical concept known as “manifolds.” Manifolds can have two dimensions, but they can have an infinite number of dimensions. One type of manifold called the “flag manifold” has six dimensions. As Shipman worked with flag manifolds, she saw patterns that were similar to the patterns of the waggle dance of the bees. Physicists use flag manifolds in dealing with subatomic particles called quarks which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Shipman believes that bees are sensitive to quarks and the sensitivity appears to be a reaction to a quantum field acting on the membranes of selected cells in the bees. It has been demonstrated that bees are sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field and the polarization of sunlight. Shipman is seeking to add the dimension of quantum fields to the bee’s repertoire of tools for location and communication.

If you are interested in digging into this in depth, there is an excellent article titled “Quantum Honeybees” in Discover magazine, November 1997. We have not found later discussions in the current literature, but the mystery of how bees communicate is far greater than the articles we have found on wolves, whales, and elephants. Attributing such things to chance products of natural selection is creative, but suggesting that the wisdom of a Creator is involved is far more satisfying to many of us who have studied these abilities.
— John N. Clayton © 2017